Episode 2.4 with Preet Banerjee

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Text transcript

Kevin Press: 

Welcome to the Canadian Advisor.cast, a podcast dedicated to financial advisors and the people who work with them. My name is Kevin Press. I’m Editorial Director of Advisor.ca. 

 My guest today is Preet Banerjee, a Consultant to the wealth management industry, Keynote Speaker, [and] Financial Educator. Welcome, Preet. Great to see you. 

Preet Banerjee:  

Thanks so much for having me, Kevin. 

Kevin Press:  

I want to start at the home page of your website; [it] promises to reimagine financial advice for both individuals and the industry. So, kind of big picture, what’s that look like to you? 

Preet Banerjee:  

Yeah, it’s a couple of things, really. I think, overarching, is a move away from product centricity towards planning centricity. And, this is from both, sort of, stakeholder perspectives, what people are looking for and moving towards, and embracing more of the human element of financial advice.  

It also, when it comes to reimagining financial advice, there’s a lot of things that are, kind of, tried and true about providing financial advice, but there’s a lot of things that are changing, and they’re changing very quickly, including the use of technology.  

And, so, a lot of my consulting and keynote work lately has been about how to apply technology in this world of wealth management to maintain and hopefully increase the value proposition for financial advisors.  

And then the other thing is recognizing that consumers have changed a lot. What we’ve seen with social media is that it is, in many cases, acting as a substitute for traditional financial advice channels. And, at the very minimum, it is acting as a complement to existing financial advice channels.  

And that’s a totally different world, where the average level of information available to consumers is much higher than it’s ever been before. 

Kevin Press:  

We were talking as we were getting ready to record today about the app store that you’re working on. Tell us about that. 

Preet Banerjee:  

Yeah, so, as part of what I do, you know, working in applications of AI and wealth management, at the end of my keynotes, I generally create a little app that is live on the web and is specific to that conference as an example of how fast you can develop software now because of AI and vibe coding.  

And the first few times I presented, you know, that in my keynote, people asked me afterwards, “Is that actually available to buy?” And it wasn’t. It was just prototyping to show what can be done. But after the third person asked, I realized there’s a business here.  

And so we created AdvisorAppStore.com, and it’s going to be a marketplace for these little boutique little apps that advisors can use in their practice. So, for example, the first app that we’re launching with- that just went live today-is called the Legacy Lens Advisor.  

And what this does, it was approaching a need that a lot of people in the industry have told me is not as well served as maybe they would like that to be. And that is estate planning, and starting those estate planning conversations. Very important for wealth transfer and retaining assets during the intergenerational transfer. A lot of advisors pay lip service to this, but they don’t have a really good process to how to facilitate these conversations.  

So what this little app does is it starts with a little survey that the advisor can send to their clients. And it’ll ask them to very quickly-they can complete it in about two minutes-use a slider input on a website to express how they’re thinking about 10 different dimensions of estate planning.  

For example, are your heirs financially prepared to receive a lot of money, or are they financially, you know, maybe not responsible enough to take on all this money? How much do you want to spend now as opposed to leaving to the next generation? If there’s a blended family, it asks, have you ever thought about, do you want to have a biological bias in how you distribute your estate or not?  

So, 10 very simple-, sort of, to-understand questions using these slider inputs. It then asks the partner to answer the exact same questions. It provides a comparative analysis, and it shows where people are furthest apart in their thinking-mostly because they’ve never been asked these questions before. But then the advisor gets an email saying, hey, these people have completed this assessment, and it then gives them an interview guide to go deeper on the areas where they’re furthest apart and where they have alignment, to really dig deep and dig into that human side of the advisor-client relationship.  

And, yeah, so as an example, you know, this app’s going to be $15 a month because it’s cheap to build. And, the reality of vibe coding today is it’s getting to the point where it’s so easy that a small percentage of advisors could build these apps.  

So, the new landscape for software and technology for advisors has to be cheap enough that there is no incentive for them to try and do it themselves. So you’re going to see the cost of software come down dramatically in the industry, and we’re hoping to take the lead by starting with the Advisor App Store.  

So if people want to go there now, you can take a look at the first app, and we have our next app launching in about a month. 

Kevin Press:  

I’m fascinated by a, kind of, tension that’s emerging, right? The industry is aging, perhaps as old as it’s ever been. And yet the technology that’s coming at advisors right now, it’s more advanced, and it seems coming more quickly than ever before.  

How do you help advisors adapt? What can they do? 

Preet Banerjee:  

Yeah, well they have to have a process in place. So, at the end of the day, good financial advice is about understanding the client, figuring out what they want, creating a plan, monitoring, reviewing it over time, et cetera. That really hasn’t changed. It should be more planning-centric.  

You can augment that with new technology of the day to help provide you with more time, to spend more time face-to-face with clients. So this is where I see the next, sort of, phase of how we use this new technology, which is coming fast and furious. I don’t think you want to use it to completely replace yourself.  

What I think you want to do is, I think you want to use it for handling the menial tasks that frees up your time so that you can spend more time with the client. That’s what they’re going to see and value, having that time with you. So if you can use technology right now to help increase your face time with clients, this, I think, is where the value proposition is changing with respect to how do you adopt technology into your practice today without it overwhelming you.  

The second part of that plan is also, has to do with succession planning, not just for clients, but for financial advisors themselves. So especially as you get into the higher-net-worth households- so they are more discerning about what they want from their financial advisors, and they want to see that you have a succession plan in place as well. And, as you know, since we both started in this industry, one of the stories that we hear about year after year is this trillion-dollar wealth transfer opportunity. Every year we hear about it, and every year we hear about how bad a job the industry is doing at it in terms of, you know, the actual retention is, I think it’s still in the single-digit percentage range. When a client dies, how much of it stays within that firm or that client, that advisor’s book of business is very, very low.  

And so, when it comes to succession planning for financial advisory practice teams, you really need to start looking at the next generation of who is going to take care of not only your book-and hopefully be someone that you sell it to-but but also who’s going to talk to the kids of your existing clients. Because a lot of research has shown that the more an advisor looks like their client, the more likely they are to follow their advice.  

But we also know that the kids of your clients are very unlikely to really embrace or engage with you unless you’re really doing something different. So, as a financial professional, I think it is important to think about your succession planning, including the next generation of advisors, the younger advisors out there who may be a little bit more adept with the new technology. And for them, it’s less overwhelming, and they can adopt it into their practices, which are a part of your practice. 

Kevin Press:  

What’s your sense of just how much clients expect a more tech-savvy financial advisor? And I’m interested, specifically, not just in that next-gen client, but even the older clients who, obviously, are surrounded by the same technology that younger Canadians are. 

Preet Banerjee:  

Yeah, it’s a great example. You know, if you think about older clients who are also exposed to the really slick interfaces of Netflix and the Apple ecosystem, this has raised the expectation for all aspects of their life. And so, I think it’s critically important that, that technology experience and advisor-using tools to match what else is going on in the world that clients are exposed to. It’s no longer should you, it is now table stakes for people. 

Kevin Press:  

Talk to me about this through the lens of the last year, right, which has been fascinating. So much anxiety. But, as an investor, if you kept your head on straight, you’ve done quite well. How has the industry done, in your sense, in the last year, and what role has technology played? 

Preet Banerjee:  

That is a fascinating question, because, you know, across North America, I’ve worked with a number of different firms, and I speak to, in my career, many, many thousands of advisors.  

It is a tangible change in what is keeping people up at night in the industry in the last couple of years, and it has been technology, and combined with social media. People are really starting to look at the value proposition. And, for the first time ever, I think, in my career, I think I’m seeing advisors who’ve been in this business a long time really starting to question as well. It’s like, yeah, where is the future of the value of advice going? Because there is all this technology now, there is all this social media access, and it’s getting harder and harder to separate, you know, the value that they provide versus what clients can get elsewhere-at least in the clients’ minds.  

And so, people are wondering, you know, what is their value proposition going for. We hear all these studies about AI’s going to replace so many jobs in various different industries and whatnot. And once we’ve seen some of the power of, you know, these AI platforms, these LLMs, vibe coding, you name it, people have started saying, hey, you know, there might actually be something to this.  

So I see a lot of people worried about what is the future of financial advice going to look like? What is the future of the value proposition going to look like? And, this is actually the backbone of what I talk to people most at, at conferences. Taking a look at, first of all, the historical narrative about new technology and the pattern that always emerges. There’s a period where it’s messy, and people really don’t understand what the impact is going to be, but they know that they’re not going to like it. So, that, I think we’re just in that phase right now. But then, eventually, we realize that if we actually harness this technology and combine that with expertise and experience, this can actually supercharge the value proposition.  

So I’ll give you an example. I think it was back in 1967 is when Barclays introduced the world’s first ATM, right? The first bank machine. And at the time, bank tellers were up in arms. They thought this is worst thing that could possibly happen. And, it turns out that those fears could not have been more wrong, because what actually ended up happening is that the bank machine was relegated to processing menial tasks: deposits and withdrawals. And it freed up bankers inside the bank branches-because these machines were so big they had to be outside-it freed up the humans inside the bank branches to provide way more value-added services. And, if you take a look at the number of bankers as a share of the labour force in the United States since 1967, for the next, I think, 50 years almost consecutively, the share of bankers grew faster than the overall labour force. So, it was the single greatest thing that ever happened to bankers was the thing that they feared the most at the time. So once they harnessed the power of what that technology was best doing, they found ways to provide higher value-added services in other ways. And I think we’re going to see the same thing with financial advice.  

It is going to, again, move away from product centricity and is going to move towards planning centricity and more towards being more human in terms of the human-to-human connection. 

Kevin Press:  

Do you think there’ll be more financial advisors as a result of AI, or will, roughly speaking, the same number of financial advisors just get to do more fulfilling work? 

Preet Banerjee:  

Yeah, it’s hard to say because we will be able to scale better advice more with technology. Is that going to lead to more and more financial advisors being out there? I don’t know. I think that there’s this one last bastion that, kind of, exists-more so in Canada than the United States-and that is as we’ve moved away from purely commission or predominantly commission-based sales to an AUM model with a little bit of fee-for-service planning-which is also growing very quickly- this AUM model is going to face this paradigm shift at some point where it feels like nothing has happened in terms of the 1% fee. That’s, kind of, like the sticky point. You know, 1% in terms of the charge on assets under management. It’s going to feel like nothing’s going happen, and then everything’s going to happen all at once. And I think we’re going to see a real margin compression when it comes to fees at some point in the future. I don’t know when it’s going to happen, but I have a sneaky suspicion that when it does happen, it’s going to happen very quickly. 

Kevin Press:  

I want to take a step back with you for a moment. You produced, really, a landmark study on the value of advice. I remember talking to you about it when you were in, sort of, the prep stage and thinking, you know, so many people have tried to do this and nobody had really nailed it before you did. Talk about the methodology you employed and what you learned. 

Preet Banerjee:  

Sure, yeah. In order to talk about the methodology, I’ll go back one step and, sort of, give you my perspective starting the research. And that was, you know, I was a financial advisor earlier on in my career. And, I, kind of, saw the discussion about the value of financial advisors as very black and white in a number of different ways.  

There were stories of people who absolutely hated financial advisors, could not trust them; they had been burned by them. And then you’d see examples of financial advisors doing amazing work. And so, there was a disconnect there.  

And then there’s all the studies that I’d ever looked at before really, kind of, considered that all investors or consumers were the same, and there was no difference between them, which, of course, is not even remotely close to the truth. And it also, kind of, assumed that all financial advisors were the same.  

So you see all these studies saying, oh let’s take a look at unadvised people versus people who use an advisor, and we’ll make some of these grand, sweeping deductions about the value of advice.  

One of the other things that I also had questions about was trying to figure out what the outcome variable was for measuring success. And a lot of the earlier studies had looked at, you know, does working with a financial advisor increase people’s rate of return, or the amount of diversification in their portfolio, et cetera.  

And, again, as we move away from product centricity and also away from portfolio centricity and towards planning centricity, how we measure what the value proposition of a contemporary financial advisor-probably also needs to be updated.  

So, one of the things I did was I came up with a suite of outcome measures, not just portfolio-centric but also two other measures. One was a measure of the breadth of financial advice. So how many different facets of people’s household decision-making were they getting advice on?  

And then also a comprehensive confidence indicator, which, again, is not just about how well they feel about their portfolio, but how they feel about the entirety of their household financial decision-making.  

The other thing I did was also differentiate the different channels of advice that are available in the marketplace, because there’s obviously something different from a full-service financial advisor at one of the top tiers with, you know, asset minimums of a million-plus, versus someone who may have a CFP, but they’re, you know, at a bank-branch level. Just the type of advice that is available.  

And then also taking into account the fact that social media is now a channel of financial advice. Whether we like it or not, it is a channel of advice that people will say that, yes, this is where I get most of my financial knowledge and advice on what to do from.  

So, I took a look at not only the different types of financial advice available, but also tried to tease out the differences, the endogeneity about whether the individual is more or less responsible for their actual decisions that they make.  

Because, I think, any financial advisor listening to this will know that there are some people who come to them because they’re very busy, they’re very intelligent, they know exactly what they want done, and they just need someone, more or less, to delegate with a little bit of guidance.  

And then there are people who are like, listen, I don’t know what I’m doing at all. I am relying completely on you to tell me exactly what to do, how much to save. And so, there is an endogeneity there. And, you have to also, sort of, account for that.  

And that’s basically saying that not everyone is created the same. So you have to control for that. You have to control for the different types of advice available. And then, to the extent that you can control for the quality of advice within a financial channel, financial advice channel that people go to.  

And so, this was kind of trying to tease away at all these questions that I had and trying to figure out, well, how do I address these questions? And the culmination of all this research and statistical analysis really came down to, I think, two big takeaways. For anyone who wants, the full dissertation’s available on my website.  

But I think the two biggest takeaways that I got from the research was, one, financial planning really matters, and it is probably the key driver of value across all outcome measures that I used almost across the board for everyone.  

And, in fact, where it really was important is the less money people had, the more valuable a financial plan was. And you could argue that’s because they are maybe more malleable, there’s more ability to change people’s life trajectory, or what have you. But also it tells you about, a little bit about the quality of advice available to people on the lower end of the wealth spectrum.  

As you go higher up the wealth spectrum, the differentiation of having a quote, unquote financial plan or not became actually less important, which might sound counterintuitive, but if you realize that the more money people have, the more access they have to higher-quality advice in general.  

More people in those higher quote, unquote channels are going to be providing more holistic-based advice because they have to. The level of competition is way higher. People in that demographic tend to have multiple advisors, not multiple financial advisors, but a lawyer, an accountant, as well as a financial advisor.  

So, it was important for everyone, but really, really important, especially lower down the wealth spectrum. And that leads me to my second major takeaway, which is that we need to do a much better job of getting better-quality advice available to the masses. Which, until the latest, you know, advents in technology, has been a very tough nut to crack from a business-model case. But now with technology and the ability to scale more standardized, holistic advice through technology, I think we are now at that precipice, and that is really exciting to me. 

Kevin Press:  

What’s your sense of, you know, how valuable the robo experience is right now for clients in the income brackets you’re describing? 

Preet Banerjee:  

Well, it’s very much a double-edged sword, because while I see a lot of promise, I also see a lot of things that are not as great as I think people would’ve hoped when it came to the robo channel.  

So, for example, there’s been a lot of research now that we’ve had the robo-advisor channel available for quite some time now in the marketplace. And, some research has said, hey listen, it’s great that we increase financial democratization, we increase financial inclusion, because, you know, investment minimums are very low, the account-opening thresholds are very low, people can trade factional shares, so you don’t need a lot of money per trade and all that stuff.  

And, on the surface, you know, that sold under this banner of financial democratization. But research has shown that because of anchoring, so, you know, this, this tendency to anchor to a certain value, place more significance on certain values. If people start investing small because now they have more access to these platforms, they stay small.  

And so, it actually has been shown to decrease the total amount of savings that these people otherwise would’ve had. Because they were able to start small, they stay anchored to those small contribution amounts. So this is part of the unfolding research on how to look at the value of, you know, many different types of channels. It’s not black and white.  

At the same time, I absolutely agree that financial inclusion, financial access has been a great thing because of robo-advisors. I think the next generation of robo-advisors is going to be far more exciting, though, in terms of delivering better-quality advice versus the first generation. The first generation was really about automating and creating a software version of investment profile questionnaires in a can and then just sticking them into a portfolio. So that was relatively easy. But the next generation I’m far more excited about. 

Kevin Press:  

One of the things that we’ve heard from a couple of our guests is a description of a, kind of, gradual professionalization of our industry over the course, really, of our careers, right? A lot has happened in the last 20 to 30 years. What’s your sense of that? 

Preet Banerjee:  

Yeah, it’s been a revelation, I think. You know, when I step back and look at what I see financial advisors doing today compared to when I started in the industry-you know, about 20 years ago now-it is night and day.  

I remember, vividly, one day I was in the office in my branch, and I was showing an advisor-I had this binder with eight different dividers for different aspects of someone’s, you know, financial life.  

And he said, “What is all this stuff? “What is this, you know, estate planning, and insurance analysis, and all this stuff?” It’s like, what do you mean what is this? This is financial, this is what you should be giving to people. And he was very much of a different pedigree, where it was just, he had a chair in his office, never used it because he was always pacing, always on the phone, just processing trades, and, you know, his assistant was just lining up call after call to just talk about, you know, selling one stock to buy another, and that’s all this guy did all day long.  

So for him, it was, you know, very different to see planning-focused advice, versus what he was doing, which was almost single security-focused investment advice, not planning. Whereas today, the opposite would be true. You know, if you found someone doing that, that would be the oddball behaviour compared to what we’re seeing as more the norm today. 

Kevin Press:  

Are you optimistic that we’ll continue to see progress, and is technology a part of that process? 

Preet Banerjee:  

Yeah, technology and social media. You know, one of the things I’ll say that I think you might find interesting is, you know, as we talk about, you know, how do we adopt technology, and compliance and legal departments, sort of, saying, well, let’s take a wait-and-see approach and what have you.  

One conversation that I’ve seen a couple of times that has quickly changed when I raise this is some firms have said, you know, we didn’t want advisors using some of the latest technologies to record conversations and transcribe, like these note-taking software applications can.  

And they said, for various reasons, some of them were saying, yeah, because if we have an accurate record of everything that was said, then we are held to a higher standard. I said, well, you should be held to higher standard anyways. But, I understand the legal and compliance, sort of, perspective on why they would push back on that.  

Then I reminded them that, you know, the clients may be using this exact same technology. So they’ll have, you know, a very accurate record of everything that may have been said in a conference call, because they have transcription software and all this stuff.  

And so, things are moving so fast. I think one of the tensions people have had is how can the industry, and especially the bigger firms, keep up with how fast things are changing from a software perspective, and also from a social media perspective.  

I think the industry has taken a more conservative approach in terms of how they allow advisors to communicate on social media. I know this has been a source of angst for a lot of people who want to say and do more on social media, but the processes at certain firms can, sort of, handcuff them a little bit.  

We’re really starting to see some headway in that. More and more firms are starting to say, yes, we need to start promoting our advisors to be more engaged on social media, because that is where people are going. Whether professionals who are licensed or they are not, that is where people are going, and they’re getting advice quote, unquote advice. Some of it might be good; some of it is really atrocious.  

And so, it’s a very uneven playing field. I know a lot of financial advisors feel very unfair about that, but that is changing. 

Kevin Press:  

You’ve been such an active writer and content creator for most of your career. Tell the story, almost 20 years ago now, when you first caught the attention of Jon Chevreau at the National Post. 

Preet Banerjee:  

[laughs] Yeah, this is a good one. This is a good one. So, at the time, I was a young advisor, very green, and I was thinking about how can I put my name out there? And I thought, well, if you look around, you know, in bookstores and online, no one has actually written a book just about RRSPs. There was a lot of books that had like a chapter or two on what RRSPs were.  

And, I thought, wouldn’t it be great to be able to say, “I’m the guy who literally wrote the book on RRSPs.” So that’s what I set out to do.  

So I wrote this book-and I think it’s 43 chapters-and it’s just about RRSP and tax planning strategies around the RRSP. And so when I finished it, I had reached out to Jonathan Chevreau, [who] at the time was at the National Post. And his office was, the National Post was not too far from where my branch was. And I said, “Hey, you’re just down the road. “I’m happy to drop off a copy of the book.” And I think he took pity on me. He said, “Yeah, go ahead. Drop it off.” So I dropped it off. And while I was there, he said, “Hey, do you want to do an interview while you’re here?” I was like, “Oh my God, absolutely.” Remember, I’m this young rookie, you know, advisor and this well-known national financial columnist has asked if I want to do an interview on this book that I’d just written. So I was quite nervous. And we go into the cafeteria and we do the interview, and he turns off his tape recorder. And by the end of this interview, I thought, you know, we’re buds now. We’re friendly. And, I didn’t know anything about dealing with the media. And, he asked what I thought was an off-the-cuff question, which was, you know, what, kind of, mutual funds do you buy for your clients? I said, “Ah, Jonathan, I don’t focus on mutual funds. I just buy low-cost index ETFs, and I focus on the planning, where I think the real value is that an advisor can deliver.” So anyways, interview’s over. They send a photographer to my office to take this, you know, a series of pictures. And I’m waiting for the article to appear in the National Post.  

And, if I remember correctly, it was three-quarters of a page, and about half the page was my photo. I was like, wow, this is amazing. This exposure. Phenomenal. And then I read the headline, which was, “New Breed of Advisor Shuns Mutual Funds.” And, at the time, I was at one of the big five brokerages. And the mutual fund department, they were not very pleased with me. And my phone was ringing off the hook. Half the calls were people internally who wanted my head on a plate, and the other half were prospective clients who said, I want to work with someone who is a straight shooter like that. So it was the single worst and single greatest day of my professional career. And I think it actually defined the rest of my career. It was a very scary and exciting moment all at the same time. 

Kevin Press:  

Yeah, it sure did define the rest of your career. My favourite part of the story was, tell me if I have this right. The Scotia Bank’s communications department knew nothing about this? 

Preet Banerjee:  

[laughs] Right, yeah. That’s right. I think the first call I got in the morning-I think it was like 7 a.m. or something like that; it was early, maybe not that early-was someone from corporate public affairs, and they said, “So, what was that all about?” And I was like, “Listen, I didn’t know that they were blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” She’s like, “All right, I figured that was the case. You didn’t know what you were doing. I just want to let you know you are not allowed to do any more interviews.”  

And I said, “Oh, that’s kind of a problem because I have an interview tomorrow at noon.” Something like that. And, I forget which publication it was, but it was big enough, and I couldn’t cancel it without looking bad.  

So I heard on the other end of the phone just this big sigh. “All right, we’re going to send someone over tomorrow morning at 7:30 a.m.”- some early time in the morning-“tomorrow.”  

And it was an emergency media training consultant and someone else from public affairs, and they trained me on what I can and can’t do in interviews when, you know, I’m partly representing the entire company.  

And they sent me through a bunch of scenarios. Double-enders-so that’s when you’re, kind of, like in a broom closet looking at a big camera, and you’ve got the earpiece in your ear, and you’re doing a TV interview.  

We went over print interviews. We went over radio interviews, live-to-tape versus live, all that stuff. And by the end, they said, “You know what? Now that we know you’re not a complete idiot, I think we’re actually going to line up more interviews for you, because now that you know what the guidelines are-what you can and can’t say-this might be a good opportunity for you.”  

And that, to their credit, they did line up more interviews for me. And, again, something that I thought was going to get me fired actually ended up being the greatest thing that ever happened. I’ll tell you another add-on to that story.  

So, at the time I was, I had written a blog. And, after my training, I said, “So now that I know what I can and can’t do, I know that I should probably volunteer and tell you that I have a blog.” And they said, “What’s a blog?” Right? So this is how long ago this was. And, I said, “Oh, it’s just a public website where I write my unfettered opinions three times a day about things to do with investing and personal finance.” They said, “Oh no, you can’t have one of those.” [laughs] But, at the time, it had enough traction that just stopping the blog would be, kind of, weird. So, to their credit, they said, “We will make you a special deal. You write blog posts faster than we could ever approve them in advance. So, we’re going to allow you to publish whatever you want without checking with us-unless you think it’s something that we would care about now that you know what we care about.” I said, “That’s fantastic.”  

And, so, I may have ruined blogging for all financial advisors back in the day and set everyone back with that early, sort of, fiasco. But, to their credit, I have to say that they were very forward-thinking at the time about dealing with media and social media at the time. But it was so early that no one really knew what anyone was doing with social media. 

Kevin Press:  

And then at what point did the content creation, sort of, become what you did? Because you really transitioned from a conventional advisor into something that was completely new. 

Preet Banerjee:  

Yeah, it was a couple of things. A culmination of, one, I had started doing more mainstream media work.  

So I had, for some reason, decided to audition for this search for on-air talent for a television network: the Women’s Television Network. And I auditioned. I ended up winning, and the overall prize was a development deal for my own television show, which we eventually shot on the Oprah Winfrey Network. So, that, kind of, I fell into that. That all happened at the same time as my work in the news media was growing.  

So I just started doing a regular panel on The National with Peter Mansbridge, and this was like a 20-minute panel in prime time about once a month during the great financial crisis. So those two things were happening. I started to, I got representation for my public speaking.  

And so, things kind of took off, and it was actually working with the crew filming stuff that I found that I had a real hobby, for lack of a better term, filmmaking, and being in front of the camera, being behind the camera. I found all of it very fascinating.  

And, so I actually started creating content, not because I had some altruistic desire to teach and educate people. I actually just liked filming things, and creating things, and editing things, and being creative with it. And, I thought, if I’m going to do this, I might as well do something that is worthwhile.  

And so I thought, well, I’ll take what I know about, you know, money and try and educate people along the way. So, it wasn’t really a grand design that I had. I kind of fell into it. And the other key ingredient was just before that, I had become very ill, to the point where I legitimately thought that I was going to die. And that changed my perspective on what I wanted to do with my life. I think had that not happened, I would’ve stayed an advisor, and maybe still would’ve been an advisor to this day. But because of that, all my priorities completely changed as to what I wanted to do professionally and personally.  

And so, had all those things not happened together, none of this wouldn’t happen. So it wasn’t some grand design. I, honestly, am just a very lucky person who was at the right place at the right time, and things kind of worked out. 

Kevin Press:  

Stephanie Wolfe of Global X Investments was on the podcast a couple of weeks back, and we were talking about some research that their firm commissioned on financial influencers, and how that impacts the conversations that clients have with financial advisors. There’s a lot good that’s happening, to your point, a lot that’s not good. How do we make the social media landscape better when it comes to financial education? 

Preet Banerjee:  

That is a very tricky problem to solve. And I think one of the most confounding factors is that the algorithms from the various different social media platforms, they’re very good at capturing people’s attention.  

And what captures people’s attention is not necessarily the truth. It is what is going to keep them on those platforms longer. So whatever that is, that’s what they’re going to prioritize. That has a double-edged effect in that content creators also get trained by the algorithm to produce what the algorithm is rewarding. And so, we find ourselves going down these rabbit holes where attention is being given to areas that really are not to the benefit of people’s financial knowledge or outcomes.  

Now, of course, there are some people who are looking for truth and credibility, and so I think there’s always going to be a place for the people who are out there putting themselves on social media to try and balance the record, to try and add some calmness, some experience, and education into the mix.  

And I can tell you from my personal experience, when I was writing my blog, I learned as much from my readers as they learned from me, and we learned together. And I think that is where social media is, kind of, been going this whole time. The problem is that there are some people who are likable, who have no idea what they’re talking about, or they get incentivized to promote, you know, opening up accounts on crypto platforms because they’re getting paid a lot of money to do so. And, that has a way of blinding them from doing what is maybe necessarily in the best interest of their followers. So, it’s a very tricky thing. You know, when it comes to regulation, even trickier. You have to, sort of, balance people’s ability to express themselves and share opinions with the harm that could potentially be done to financial consumers.  

And so, how do you develop a framework that is going to evolve as fast as social media, and how people consume content evolves? That’s a very, very tricky thing to do. 

Kevin Press:  

What about traditional financial journalism? What’s your take on its state these days? 

Preet Banerjee:  

Yeah, I think that a lot of it is the same in terms of, you know, algorithm driving what people consume, and that having a knock-on effect to what ends up getting created.  

What I see from a lot of financial journalists that I respect is they have this code of what they write about, how do they write about it, in the face of all the criticism that they might get in terms of, like, these days you can’t go to any website that talks about news without getting some accusations hurled at you about bias. And, they can rise up above that and still deliver the news the way that I, kind of, remembered it when I was growing up and my parents were growing up, and it was very, it was seen as credible and respectable, and now people are tarnishing all journalists with these broad strokes, which, I think, is very unhealthy.  

But, I do want to, you know, celebrate and champion the people like yourself. A lot of people that we know mutually who continue to want to do what’s best for the readers, the viewers, and giving them the facts and unbiased-as-possible information. So, I think the value is getting more and more, even though from, you know, the economics, it seems like the value has gone down and down. But now as we have all this noise, misinformation, disinformation, knowing who to trust has become more valuable than ever before. 

Kevin Press:  

Before I let you go, I want to ask you about an old friend of ours, a founding editor of Advisor.ca, Darin Diehl. Darin passed three years ago just this past January. What did he mean to you? 

Preet Banerjee:  

A lot. And I think the last time you and I saw each other was at his Celebration of Life. And I think about Darin a lot, at least once every couple of weeks. He had a very big impact on me.  

You may not know this, but his wife, Jeanette, she was one of the directors on the TV show that I worked on the Oprah Network. And I did not know that she was Darin’s wife until, you know, well into production. And I had worked with Darin, you know, back in the day, and then later on in a different iteration in his career when he was doing content marketing for one of the banks and we had done work together.  

And so I got to know them individually, and then I got to know them together. And I remember just a couple of years ago, we hatched this plan to surprise his wife. He was going to take her to the south of France, and I happened to be in the south of France at the same time, I was planning to.  

And I said, you know, why don’t we surprise Jeanette, and I’ll just sort of be on a random park bench when you guys are there to surprise her for her birthday. And so we had that surprise. And, the amount of swearing [laughs] that you heard in the Riviera when she saw me was hilarious. If you know Jeanette, she’s a very animated person. Absolutely love her. In fact, we’re still in touch, and I live in London now, and hopefully she’s going to swing by and stay with us for a couple of days. So, I’m still in touch with his wife, and they both mean a lot to me.  

And Darin was, I wish the people who never got to meet Darin, I wish they did. He was one of those truly genuine, amazing people that you wish you could clone many times over. And if the world was filled with more Darins, the world would be such a better place. I miss him so much, and yeah, I’m glad that our paths crossed in life. That’s for sure. 

Kevin Press:  

You know, he and I talked about you a lot. He was a huge fan, as I am, and you were always one of the best from our perspective. So, Preet, thank you. It’s been a pleasure to have this conversation with you. Good to see you again. 

Preet Banerjee:  

Thank you so much, Kevin. 

Kevin Press:  

My guest has been Preet Banerjee. Visit PreetBanerjee.com. Canadian Advisor.cast is a production of Newcom Media. It’s produced by Alisha Hiyate. Noushin Ziafati is our Associate Producer. My name’s Kevin Press. Thanks for being with us.